Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Alice Ping Yee Ho, directed by Nina Lee Aquino
Canadian Children’s Opera Company Company, Toronto Centre for the Arts, Toronto
May 25-27, 2018
“Welcome the New ‘King’ at the CCOC”
The latest opera written for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, The Monkiest King, is a musically and visually colourful creation. Based on the adventures of a mythological hero from Song Dynasty China (960-1279), the CCOC explores a new world of culture and sound to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and librettist Marjorie Chan, who won the 2013 Dora Award for Outstanding New Opera for their Toronto Masque Theatre commission of The Lesson of Da Ji, have found in the rambunctiousness of the Monkey King a figure who embodied the rambunctiousness of children in general. The opera skillfully written to incorporate the talents of children from kindergarten to Grade 10+, is sure to become a favourite at the CCOC and likely elsewhere as well.
Though the character of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, arose in China, it combined elements of Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism and became a popular figure throughout East and Southeast Asia and has remained so to this day. Of the many versions of his story the most important is the16th-century novel Journey to the West (西遊記) by Wu Cheng’en, considered one of the “Four Great Classical Novels” of Chinese literature. The is best known in English under the title Monkey, in the 1942 abridged translation of Arthur Waley.
The novel consists of 100 chapters and, in its latest, complete translation by W.J.F. Jenner, is 2346 pages long. Librettist Marjorie Chan, aware that the opera should only be one hour long and yet utilize the talents of six different choruses divided according to age group, wisely decided to focus only on the first seven chapters of the novels about Sun Wukong’s origin and his transformation from trickster to hero.
Chan gives the opera a frame in which a boy (Madelaine Ringo-Stauble) stays in a museum after closing hours and hides from a night watchman (Alastair Thorburn-Vitols) trying to find him. Eventually, he falls asleep near an exhibit featuring a stuffed monkey and is transformed in his dreams into the Monkey King himself. In the first part of his dream the monkey boasts that he is superior to all other beasts and proves it against land animals, birds and fish. Not satisfied with that, he claims that he is superior to all other monkeys, hence Chan’s term “monkiest”, and should be considered their king. He proves this against a red monkey challenger in a race up waterfalls that lead to heaven.
The Monkiest King wins, but then he finds himself in the realm of the Jade Emperor (also Thorburn-Vitols), who is not at all pleased that someone calls himself a king. Here, echoing the chase about the museum, the Emperor sends his soldiers to chase the Monkiest King around his realm. Perhaps the most comic of these adventures is when the Monkiest King hides in the imperial stables holding eight horses, and it takes forever for the Emperor and his soldiers to figure out what seems wrong.
Finally, the Emperor captures the Monkiest King and imprisons him inside a mountain, but the monkey’s tears are so plentiful they nearly drown the people in the village below. He is rescued Kwanyin (Alexa Frankian), the goddess of mercy, whom the monkey had met before but disregarded as of no consequence. She convinces the Monkiest King that he should turn his many talents to doing good instead of merely making mischief. The monkey is given a chance to do just that when a disaster strikes just near the end of the opera.
As should be evident from this synopsis, Chan has packed the hour-long work with constant action and an enormous cast of varied characters. Composer Alice Ping Yee Ho has responded with a kaleidoscopic score for a ten-member ensemble of Chinese and Western instruments – namely a harp, extended percussion, a string quartet, a player of Chinese and Western woodwinds, plus ehru, pipa and guzheng. Ho, who used a similar ensemble for The Lesson of Ja Di, masterfully combines and contrasts the sonorities of the two sets of instruments for a wide ranges of delightful effects from traditional Chinese folksong-like accompaniment, to bursts of dissonance for the various disasters that occur in the story, to swaths of glissandi representing flight and escape. Perhaps the most beautiful single chorus in the opera is the chorus of Clouds that greets the Monkey King on his arrival in heaven that is imbued with a Holstian otherworldliness.
Audiences should note that the opera is double cast. Other performances feature Lucas Drube as the Monkey King, Connor Ross as the Jade Emperor and Ana Sofia Ferrer-Kyrtsos as Kwanyin.
The only adult performer in the opera is Xi Yi, a dancer from Toronto’s Little Pear Garden Dance Company, who gave a beautiful performance combining extraordinary flexibility and strength during the Clouds’ chorus that greets the Monkiest King’s arrival. The choreography for Yi’s dance and for the entire opera is by LPGDC artistic director Emily Cheung, who shows great imagination in how to move large groups of young people around the stage in exciting patterns and still take into account the great differences in age between the youngest and oldest. Her most humorous idea was to give the Jade Emperor’s soldiers a shuffling walk as if they were wind-up toys, something that immediately suggested their ineffectiveness.
Where Cheung’s ideas end and those of director Nina Lee Aquino start is hard to tell since so much of the stage movement is like dance. To Aquino I will attribute the brilliant idea of having the young performers play the roles of exhibits in the museum and later of natural formations like the mountain that holds the Monkiest King prisoner. Aquino also draws a wide range of individualized emotion from the group when they play villagers first threatened with floods and later with earthquakes.
The costume designs of Camellia Koo are absolutely delightful and exceedingly imaginative in representing everything from barnyard animals to fish to gods. The Monkiest King wears a half-mask with traditional face painting and pom-pom headdress while still wearing red trainers to indicate the dreaming boy beneath. Koo arrays the Jade Emperor in the traditional style of Peking Opera including a false beard but omitting the face mask. For Kwanyin, Koo created a gorgeous white gown whose drapery will recall statues of the goddess that some may have seen on travels in Asia. All of this is enhanced by Michelle Ramsay’s inventive lighting that helps to conjure up the numerous fantastic places called for in the story.
Teri Dunn conducts the 10-member ensemble with both fluidity and precision, some of the most effective portions of the score being those written for plucked strings both Western and Chinese.
The Monkiest King may be an opera written for young performers, but it is sure to please both old and young alike. The beauty and variety of Alice Ping Yee Ho’s score will likely be most appreciated by regular opera-goers, while young people will get caught up in the non-stop action of Marjorie Chan’s storytelling and the continual movement on stage overseen by Emily Cheung and Nina Lee Aquino. The libretto is in both English and Mandarin (there are English surtitles) and audiences will marvel at how the CCOC members sing in both languages with such aplomb. All the young people on stage were born in the 21st century and seeing their enthusiastic portrayal of a non-Western story gives hope for the acceptance of greater cultural diversity in the arts in Toronto in the future.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) The Monkiest King is born; the Jade Emperor discovers the Monkiest King in his stables; youngest members of the CCOC portraying fish. ©2018 Ken Hall.
For tickets, visit www.canadianchildrensopera.com.
2018-05-26
The Monkiest King